


Five Tricks in Five Senses

by justinlovesart



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-29
Updated: 2012-07-29
Packaged: 2017-11-11 00:33:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/472456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justinlovesart/pseuds/justinlovesart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five ficlets/drabbles of varying length about Justin tricking in and around New York.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Tricks in Five Senses

**1\. The 11 O’ Clock**

Justin senses the stranger’s gaze on him long before he looks up to meet it. So, when he lifts his head from the book he’s reading (a story about a child who falls into the depths of the ocean and likes what she finds there), he does so slowly, deliberately, trying to guess what he’ll see.

This one has the darkest eyes, irises nearly as black as the pupils, now dilated in the dim subway light; lashes so thick they look as if covered by layer upon layer of mascara: maybe they are. 

He’s standing by the train’s door, leaning lightly against the metal pole for balance, one hand around the strap of his messenger bag. 

_”Another gay in New York City,”_ Justin thinks, _“yet no one ever quite the same.”_

As the man lets his gaze slide down from Justin’s eyes to his mouth and the book he’s holding in his lap, then slowly back up, Justin runs a quick mental check: _“How many stops to my exit? Will I follow him if his stop comes first? Did I have breakfast before leaving home or will my stomach grumble while we fuck?”_

Then he closes his book and puts it away, but first he carefully places his bookmark - the one he's designed - between the pages. He’ll need to re-read the last few sentences. 

He adjusts the strap of his own bag around his shoulder and grabs the handle of his large art folder. 

He checks his watch as he often does in the city, where time seems to run away from him or expand with a logic of its own, one he hasn’t quite mastered yet, and it occurs to him that he’s never picked up a trick before 11 in the morning. This makes him smile. And since his stop is coming up soon, _“I’ll fuck him in my studio,”_ he decides, because it’s more practical like that. Perhaps, afterwards, he’ll ask if he can sketch his eyes in charcoal, to try and capture those gradations of black.

He stands up and nods, ever so slightly, and when the train stops and the doors open, he steps out without looking back, knowing that he’ll be followed.

 

**2\. Mr Goodfuck**

This one has been exceptionally good, as tops in tailored suits and expensive cologne often are in his experience, especially those who can take the afternoon off to fuck. 

Even now, as he catches his breath limbless and sated, and begins to adjust to the emptiness left by the man’s spent cock, Justin can smell the scent that made him follow him to his house, mixed with clean sweat and traces of fabric softener on the sheets.

This Upper East Side apartment - with a view of the park and cream-colored carpets that are vacuumed daily – smells like flowers. And when he finally opens his eyes, Justin sees the bunch of purple tulips on the low dresser, sinuous and elegant, with a silver-framed photograph by their side: a blonde woman with wet hair laughing in unison with an equally blonde girl in a pink swim-cap.

“Are you judging me?”

The deep voice startles Justin, who has momentarily forgotten his host, the man who only a few minutes ago was pushing his head into the mattress while pounding his ass and whispering into his ear some of the filthiest words Justin has ever heard from a trick.

“Of course not,” Justin replies, but they both know he’s lying.

The married trick lifts himself up, places a few pillows behind his back with a movement so slick and so graceful it makes Justin itch for his sketch pad. “You saw the ring,” the man reminds him.

Justin nods, but looks away, back at the flowers. He wonders if she chose them, and the yellow ones he saw in the hall when they arrived and her husband slammed him against the plum-colored wallpaper.

“Ah, you thought it was for someone of the male persuasion.” 

“It makes no difference,” Justin replies, annoyed at how easily this trick can read him, how amused he sounds. He gets up from the bed.

“Apparently it does to you.”

He looks for his clothes knowing full well he’s behaving like a brat. 

“You can take a shower before your go,” the man suggests after a while, and there’s no mockery in his voice, but Justin shakes his head. _”When did I become a hypocrite?”_ , he asks himself as he dresses. He imagines a bathroom filled with perfumes and scented bottles, fluffy towels in pastel tones. He wonders if there are freshly-cut flowers in there, too.

When Justin is ready, he turns around to say goodbye but his host is already out of bed. Naked, he walks Justin across the bedroom, along the corridor and then through the hall to the entrance door. He opens it for him.

“Thank you,” is all Justin can say, and silly as it sounds even to himself he hopes this will make up for the rudeness of his sudden fit of moralism. 

The man smiles his goodbye, before closing the door behind him.

As he walks back home in the fading light of the late afternoon, Justin wonders if his good fuck will change the sheets himself or if a maid will do it for him.

 

**3\. The Mile High Trick**

He imagines he can still taste Brian’s come and doesn’t want this to end. Not ever.

Some weekends are so perfect these days, so free of doubt, that the flights back from Pittsburgh are spent savoring the hours that have just gone by, shapes of memories and future artworks forming behind his closed eyelids.

On such flights, blowing the ginger-haired attendant who’s starting to become familiar is just a way – however imperfect and inadequate - to prolong those feelings.

“Champagne?” his mile-high trick will offer him later, eyes still glazed over from his stifled orgasm in the bathroom.

But Justin will shake his head politely, and look out of the window as the plane approaches New York, the full moon hanging over it so close and so bright that Justin wonders if all those artificial lights below are really necessary.

He runs his tongue over his palate and pretends there is no difference between the come that is coating it now and the one he remembers.

 

**4\. The Zucchini Man**

He’s not the first celebrity Justin has had sex with, but he’s the first one with a British accent. 

He wouldn’t even recognize him is if it wasn’t for his unmistakable voice, since they hook up at an art “event” where they’re all required to wear masks and never take them off. At the buffet, during the second interval (it’s one of _those_ endless performances) they can lift them up just enough to push bite sizes of food through their mouths.

“Bloody hell,” Justin hears from the nervous man standing next to him. He realizes instantly that received pronunciation, even as nasal as this one, can give him an instant hard-on “I wish they had given us straws for the champagne, at the very least!”

Justin agrees. “And for the faux caviar. I’d rather suck it directly from the jar than lick it off these giant bread rolls.” 

His masked companion chokes a bit on his morsel, but recovers quickly. “Look, baby courgettes! They look like the right size, too. Would you care for one?” he asks Justin, handing him a plate.

“Courgettes... Oh, zucchini, you mean!” Justin picks one of the miniature vegetables and opens his mouth just enough to fit it all in.

The young English actor nods quickly, and Justin imagines him blushing faintly behind his mask. How flustered will he be with Justin’s dick up his ass, legs pushed all the way to his ears and his famously boyish haircut all messed up by sweat and pre-cum?

“Zucchini, of course,” the Brit is pretending to stutter now, just like in his films. Actors, such predictable flirts! “The same for aubergines: I always forget you call them eggplants here.”

No arty New Yorker present in this room would be caught dead calling an eggplant an eggplant these days, but Justin will play along, because he really wants to see if young Courgette Man here keeps his glasses on when someone jerks him off ever-so-slowly; if he pushes them up his nose as he’s about to come; if he swears “Bloody hell” when he finally does.

Tonight, he plays dumb American and asks: “Auber...what? What did you call them?” 

 

**5\. The Guy with the Cap**

Justin doesn’t really go for younger tricks, they’ve never been his thing. But this one has introduced himself as Ian and he cannot resist the irony, imagining a few possible opening lines for tomorrow’s phone call with Brian. Besides, the kid is wearing a cap and Justin has never fucked someone who wears a cap in a gay club before.

He’s taken him home, because backrooms are never as good as the one in Babylon and he’s too old for sex in an alley. He wants the comfort of a hot shower in a bathroom he knows will be reasonably clean and a bed he doesn’t have to worry about leaving as soon as he comes. 

Home comforts of sorts, but they make for better dreams.

There’s also the fact that he truly likes the softness of his own bed under him while he leans back on his elbows as someone sucks him off quietly, a few sounds from his neighbors the only background noise to the gentle slurping and lapping, and to the enfolding warmth. 

Here, if he gazes outside his open window in this mildest of nights, he makes out the shape of the deserted High Line: a nocturnal rainbow across the city, dimmed in the darkness but comforting nonetheless for being there, existing mid-air between the streets and the top of buildings in this place that aspires to the sky. 

It reminds him of his old dreams of flying.

Back inside the room, Ian is kneeling between his legs, tending to his pleasure with precise determination and without hurry. He’s not taken off his cap, Justin realizes, only turned it around so that the visor doesn’t interfere with his blowing. 

It makes Justin smile with the indulgence he’s only just begun to feel for the very young. But he feels something else too: not quite guilt for not offering him a word of interest, a drink, let alone suggest that he makes himself comfortable enough to lose his cap; but a sense of unease, yes, mainly with himself: for not caring enough to notice; to touch the other man. When had he bcome so... unkind?

So Justin does exactly that. He pushes the cap off the boy’s head and sets it aside on the bed, then he runs his hand through hair that is thicker, longer, curlier than he’d expected. Why was the kid hiding it?

He finds the answer under his fingertips. 

The scar is just below and to the left of the top of the skull, a knot of hard flesh about two inches long, perfectly stitched and all too familiar. By now Ian has stilled and looks up at him with eyes that sparkle despite the darkness, tempting Justin to close his own, to pretend he hasn’t noticed, like many have done with him before.

“When?” he asks instead. And after Ian murmurs his answer Justin asks some more, then more again.

There will be drinks and kind words tonight. Most likely, no fucking. 

Tomorrow, there will be furious painting and tireless drawing, and the opening line to his phone call with Brian will be quite different from how Justin had imagined it.


End file.
